Tony Abbott’s plan to pay working mothers to stay home with their babies for the first six months has been attacked by big business, big unions, feminists, the commentariat and by Kev himself. This is a good indication that it will appeal to Labor’s forgotten families.
Young families face great stresses in today’s society as they juggle the responsibilities of work, school and childcare. These stresses can lead to breakdowns in the family unit which invariably lead to lose-lose situations for all concerned. Our ageing population and the trend for smaller families demands that we seek ways to increase the fertility rate.
Encouraging young couples to have children by assisting them to overcome the financial burdens they will face with one partner out of the workforce for awhile has considerable merit. It is certainly more attractive than Kevin Rudd’s miserly scheme to only pay them the minimum wage for 18 weeks. It’s little wonder that Labor no longer mutter the words ‘working families’.
Big business will get little sympathy from Abbott over their objections to a levy to cover the cover the cost of the scheme. One of the chief spokeswomen, Heather Ridout, is also head of the Rudd’s cheersquad at the big end of town. Abbott is also aware that they hedge their political bets by contributing equal amounts to both the Liberal and Labor parties.
One commentator has observed that the notion that Liberals aren’t supposed to embrace big-picture ideas that promote social policy improvements ignores the words of Menzies when he pointed out that most Australians “see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.”
Nearly 70 years on, that sounds like a good reason to back a generous parental leave scheme.
Small business is the natural constituency for the Liberal Party. They have little protection against predatory practices from big business or the destructive tactics of big unions. Abbott has therefore been careful not to shift the burden onto this sector by exempting those with a taxable income of less than $5 million.
Cries of economic irresponsibility from the commentariat also seem hollow in comparison to Labor’s waste and mismanagement of its dopey pink batts fiasco, the cost of a Julia Gillard Memorial Hall in every school in the country, the looming blowout of a National Broadband Network and a host of other mad-cap ideas such as grocery watch, petrol watch, whale watch, etc., etc.
Our families are our nation builders and anything we can do grow and keep them together should be lauded.
